Alice Malsenior Walker (born February 9, 1944) is an American novelist,
short story writer, poet, and activist. She wrote the critically acclaimed
novel The Color Purple (1982) for
which she won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Walker was born in Putnam County,
Georgia, the youngest of eight children, to African-American sharecroppers. Her
father, who was, in her words, "wonderful at math but a terrible
farmer," earned only $300 ($4,000 in 2013 dollars) a year from
sharecropping and dairy farming. Her mother supplemented the family income by
working as a maid. The family also had Native American ancestry, which Walker drew from in her writing and
spirituality. Her mother worked 11 hours a day for $17 per week to help pay for
Alice to attend college.

Living under Jim Crow laws, Walker's parents resisted landlords who
expected the children of black sharecroppers to work in the fields at a young
age. A white plantation owner said to her that black people had "no need
for education". Minnie Lou Walker, according to her daughter, replied
"You might have some black children somewhere, but they don't live in this
house. Don't you ever come around here again talking about how my children
don't need to learn how to read and write." Her mother enrolled Alice in first grade when the girl was
four years old.

Growing up with an oral
tradition, listening to stories from her grandfather (who was the model for the
character of "Mr." in The Color Purple), Walker began writing, very privately, when she was eight years old.
"With my family, I had to hide things," she said. "And I had to
keep a lot in my mind."

In 1952, Walker was accidentally wounded in the right eye by a shot from a BB gun fired by one of her brothers.
In 2013, on BBC Radio's Desert Island Discs, she said the act was deliberate
but she agreed to protect her brother against their parents' anger if they knew
the truth. Because the family had no car, the Walkers could not take their daughter to a hospital for immediate
treatment. By the time they reached a doctor a week later, she had become
permanently blind in that eye. When a layer of scar tissue formed over her
wounded eye, Alice became
self-conscious and painfully shy. Stared at and sometimes taunted by other
children, she felt like an outcast and turned for solace to reading and to
writing poetry. When she was 14, the scar tissue was removed. She later became valedictorian and was voted most-popular
girl, as well as queen of her senior class, but she realized that her traumatic
injury had some value: it had allowed her to begin "really to see people
and things, really to notice relationships and to learn to be patient enough to
care about how they turned out".

After high school, Walker went to Spelman College in
Atlanta on a full scholarship in 1961 and later transferred to Sarah Lawrence
College in New York, graduating in 1966. Walker
was strongly affected by becoming pregnant and having an abortion in the summer
of 1965 before her senior year of college. She became severely depressed and
determined to commit suicide. She struggled out of this experience by writing
poems, which were published as Once
(1968), her first book of poetry.

Walker became interested in the Civil Rights Movement in part due to the
influence of activist Howard Zinn, who was one of her professors at Spelman
College. To continue the activism of her college years, Walker returned to the South from New York. She participated in
voter registration drives, campaigns for welfare rights, and children's
programs in Mississippi.

In addition to publishing her
collected short stories and poetry in 1970, that year Walker published her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland. It explores the life of Grange
Copeland, an abusive, irresponsible sharecropper, husband and father. In 1976, Walker's second novel Meridian was published. Meridian is a
"semi-autobiographical narrative based upon Walker’s experience in the 1960s… is her retrospective on the
social, racial, and sexual upheavals that the Civil Rights and Black Power eras
produced." The novel dealt with activist workers in the South during the
civil rights movement, with events drawn closely parallel to some of Walker's own experiences.

In the late 1970s Walker moved to northern California. In
1982, she published what has become her best-known work, The Color Purple. The novel follows a young troubled black woman
fighting her way through not just racist white culture but patriarchal black
culture as well. The book became a bestseller and was subsequently adapted into
a critically acclaimed 1985 movie directed by Steven Spielberg featuring Oprah
Winfrey and Whoopi Goldberg, as well as a 2005 Broadway musical totaling 910
performances.